Our goal was to write a program of simple and easy management and a transparent user interface being able to deal with any kind of compression tasks supporting the creation of so called SelF-eXtracting Archive files along with other wide-spread archive types.

We realized that notable deficiencies of the known compressing utilities beside not having a complex multilingual user interface are that they are also incapable of sorting files into different folders. Users can usually extract the whole set of compressed files into a predefined (usually Temp) folder. Most compressors instead of supporting multilevel compressing tasks only allow you to add one folder or file.

Effective compression. You can achieve a 30-40% size compression with sfx compared to other archive formats.

Creating well-known file types (zip, bh, cab, jar, tar, tar.gz)

Adding several folders and files simultaneously

List of files to be compressed (size, pieces, filenames) is checkable before compressing

Handling exceptions

Filtering files to be compressed according to date, size and attribute

Using environment variables

You can determine where you want your archives to be extracted. You can extract each file into different folders meaning you can get your extracted file to its original location.

You can create a shortcut* making extracted filed executable*.

You can save each compressing project for reuse (SFXWizard project file - SFW).

Customizable graphic appearance support in created archives.

Specific examples to prove the real efficiency of sfx-es

In this example a mixed folder containing different kinds of files like txt, exe, bmp, jpg, zip, rar, etc. is compressed. The below table shows you how sfx file format is 40% more efficient than traditional zip.

sfx

zip

Compressed files (piece)

16 646

16 646

Original size (byte)

820 513 874

820 513 874

Compressed size (byte)

189 297 411

320 971 717

Time (ms)

590 760

226 404

Compression rate

76,93%

60,88%

SFX module size (byte)

331 767

0

Compressed file size (byte)

189 629 178

320 971 717

Efficiency compared to zip**

40,92%

0%

In the following example a compression of purely text files has occurred. You can see that this resulted in a 86% better compression than the traditional zip.